Hey y'all, it's Erin. This week I was unexpectedly all by my lonesome, so I played an interview between Erin Hedge, Valerie Oser and Christopher Blackwell, an incarcerated journalist who spoke with them on the realities of reporting from incarceration. And then I spent the last 20 minutes talking, pretending that I was sitting next to my best friend, filling them in on what had happened this week. So if you're not already tired of my voice, you're about to be. All right, this is Free Range, a co-production of KYRS and Range Media. And for the very first time I'm flying solo. So you're gonna have to give me a little bit of grace here. Um, but I'm excited to share a couple of things with y'all today. Um, earlier this week our reporter, Erin Hedge and our editor Valerie Oser, sat down for a conversation with Christopher Blackwell, an incarcerated reporter. Um, I'm gonna go ahead and play some of the footage from that interview, which I think is pretty interesting. It's one of the things we've been navigating as a news outlet, um, how to go about reporting with incarcerated writers who often have limitations in technology, um, in the time they can spend. I mean, hedge was telling me, I think, on the radio show that in order to communicate with incarcerated writers that he's co-written stories with. There is a really harsh character limit on the, uh, system that you can communicate through. So he'll have to send drafts of stories back and forth in like 500 word chunks. It can sometimes be like an eight part email, uh, just trying to share a draft with edits, and then you get charged for each of those messages you send. So it can be kind of a, a complicated, um, even expensive process just to communicate with incarcerated writers. But at range we really think it's important to empower people to tell their own stories and to work with people who have firsthand knowledge of some of the topics we're covering. So I'm gonna go ahead and get that recording queued up. Uh, and you know, after that I think I'm going to run through some of the stuff that I've been covering. I'm just gonna pretend. You know, I've never done this by myself, so I think I'll just pretend that I'm talking to a good friend out there or a roommate and trying to explain the news. So we've got about 27 minutes of a interview with an incarcerated writer. A I didn't, it's Val and Aaron here. We're trying to get in touch with Christopher Blackwell, who is an incarcerated journalist. So Chris writes about, like, you, you had a question about like what kinds of things he, he writes, he writes about like a pretty wide range of issues. Mm-hmm. Um, including like environmental stuff at prisons and like, um, yeah, he's, he's mostly concerned with prison reform. Mm-hmm. And specifically like how to. Essentially like reduce the prison population, which is basically like trying to let people out earlier than they're supposed to be in for. Yeah. We're trying to interview about what it's like to be an incarcerated journalist and one of the things that we're experiencing right now is he tried to call and I got a message from him, but not an actual call because the technology that they use to, um, allow incarcerated journalists to call civilians is real glitchy. We are experiencing it in live time people. Yes we are. This is fun. Okay, so I'm gonna jump in here to let you know that for about nine minutes and 47 seconds, Val and Hedge are jumping through all of these hoops with this securest technology, trying to get a hold of Christopher Blackwell. Um, you know, as much as I wanna fill dead air here, I don't think any of us wanna listen to nine minutes and 45 seconds of technology issues. Might be having you pulling your hair out on your drive. So we're gonna jump to the moment they get Chris on the phone. Hi Chris. Hi, Chris. You there? Yep. Uh, it would help if I merged. I just, I I was talking to the empty zoom room. I forgot I didn't merge you in. No, I, I almost hung up too. Hey, thanks for bearing with us, Chris. Valerie, how's everybody doing? Well, how are you? I am good. I'm good. I will only, I have till about 3 35. Okay. Okay. Because actually my, my tablet phone's messed up, so I'm in the day room on the phone. So also, you'll probably have to forgive a little melody, but good to be here with you, Eric. Cool. Good to meet you, Al. Yeah. Yeah. And real quick, um, Chris, is it okay that we record? Oh, yeah. You're good. Okay, cool, cool, cool. I figured, but, uh, just wanna make sure we're in a two party consent state. Okay. So we've got, um, we've got about 22 minutes left. Mm-hmm. If you gotta get off at 3 35, thanks for letting us know. Yeah. Um, yeah, and you and I can catch up about, uh, look to justice stuff later on if, if we need to do that. Um, but thanks so much for, thanks so much for doing, agreeing to do this interview with us. We think it's, um, we think it's important for people to know it's like to be, you know, an incarcerated journalist, activist. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So you wanna go first, judge? Yeah. Yeah. No. Okay. So, um, can you tell us, I mean, like, you and I have been chatting for a few months now. Uh, I think, um, but just tell us, can, can you just start real basic, like, what got you into journalism as an incarcerated person? Well, that's, you know, you, you want to see something different. Mm-hmm. Right? You wanna have a voice, you want to see the system operate different. You wanna see it operate in a way that it's not causing harm. Mm-hmm. And I've been in prison for 22 years, right? Mm-hmm. But I've only been writing and publishing since around 2020. So I went through college, I learned all this stuff, and then I was like, how do I express this to people? How do I show people what's going on inside so we can start to change some of this and actually build a system that is releasing people that are better off in society, right? That are adding society. And that was like the spark of like wanting to share that and wanting to share that through personal stories. Like humanizing stories is something that we always talk about, right, Aaron? Like how do we tell something in a way that humanizes the people we're talking about so that we can change the way we think about these things? Mm-hmm. And these structures that aren't extremely harmful and obviously have been harmful for hundreds of years and are built off things like slavery, right? Mm-hmm. So how do we revamp that and rethink these structures? And I think that writing offered that. Writing gave me the opportunity to tell people's stories, who couldn't tell it for themselves. Mm-hmm. And also to share and tell my story so I could begin to let people kind of see how these systems function and how easy it is for someone to get put on a trajectory where they end up in prison or incarcerated for most during the rest of their lives. Hmm. And when you say that you went to college and everything, were you doing college through, uh, like in while in prison? Or was this before? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I definitely wasn't in college before prison. Yeah. Okay. I probably would've changed the trajectory of my life. Yeah. But no, I, I was blessed to be at a prison at the Monroe Correctional Complex. Mm-hmm. The Washington State Reformatory, where we had University Beyond Bars, which was a nonprofit organization that literally was raising all the funds before pay grants and they from private donors and foundations and bringing education in, bringing educators from the University of Washington, Seattle University, evergreen University. Wow. And coming in and teaching us credit based classes. Huh. You know, and, and for me that was hard 'cause I had dropped outta school. Mm-hmm. You know, I dropped out in early ninth grade, but I literally quit participating in about fifth and sixth grade. Mm-hmm. So my level of math and reading and writing was like crazy bad. Yeah. And I struggled so hard just to get to do algebra and things like that. The poor guys, they helped me learn through this process. And the teachers that volunteered their time, like, you know, God saved them because they really went through a lot and, and specifically that's because like. You grew up in a community that was really beset by a lot of like, very troubling social circumstances, and can you talk a little bit about that? Right. So I grew up in Tacoma, Washington. I grew up in the nineties, um, obviously in the early two thousands. And I grew up on the Hilltop area in Tacoma, which, you know, is, is in downtown area, Tacoma. Everybody knows it is, you know, probably one of the, you know, most violent neighborhoods, especially during that time in our state, you know, um, it's, it's rough, right? You grow up in a way where you're basically living in survival mode. Mm-hmm. So it's not like, oh, I'm just trying to get by and go to school and do this in life. It's like, no, how do I freaking survive daily? Like how do I get them the poverty that we're living? 'cause my mom is a single parent, you know, that ran from an abusive relationship in Oregon with my dad, you know, and moved up here, you know, and we're trying to survive. She's working two jobs, so she's not really home. I'm out in the streets, you know, my only role models are drug dealers. Right. They're the only successful people I know. Mm-hmm. And you're just surrounded by violence. Yeah. You know, when you grow up in a space like that, you know, there's two things that you know for sure. The system and the police are not there to support you or help you. They're there to manage you and often take you away to be incarcerated at times. Right. Because you have practices of things that are far different than they would be in any other places. I was actually introduced to the Carceral system for having a gram of weed at the age 12. Oh wow. From that day on, I never got out of the system. I was always on probation. I was always in the juvenile system, you know, and it just perpetuated and snowballed and snowballed until eventually, like I cause extreme, serious harm. Mm-hmm. You know, it took someone's life in a drug robbery. Right. Just something I need to be accountable. And it's something that's like, you know, this is at my hands, but also it's also in our state's hands and our society's hands that we allow children to be raised in such environments where they're literally trying to survive day in and day out. Mm-hmm. And at what point as a society, like do we have to take responsibility for those communities that are suffering in that way and start to rebuilding and reshift them communities to be in a much better place? That's, that's the environment I was in. Right. Yeah. So what kind of reporting do you do? Like, do you do column based reporting or do you work on like more straight news type things? I've read, I do it all. Okay. Because I've read some of your work and I do it all. It's not all, I made it a. Right. And I made it a point to do that. Mm-hmm. Right. You know, when I started writing, it was a personal essay and then Covid happened to hit. Mm-hmm. And I was the first person that was incarcerated and write a piece about Covid inside. Okay. You know, and then I wrote about 30 pieces about Covid. Right. What we were experiencing, how things were going down. I wanted to be documented, right? Mm-hmm. I wanted to make sure in history that people had something to turn back to and say, this is what's going on, this is what happened, at least in Washington State. But then I got to a point to where I was like, man, I want to make sure I'm not pigeonholed as someone that's just writing about Covid. Mm-hmm. In prison because other journalists don't have access to it. Yeah. So I started working with other journalists that were investigative journalists and learning how to do some of that, right? Like how to dive, be how to do public disclosures. Mm-hmm. Um, you know, how to do interviews better and stuff like that. And I started working with them, you know, sometimes I would partner, they would teach me a lot and, and mentor me in that space. And then, you know, as, as time progressed, like I learned how to tell stories in very different ways. Right. Sometimes it's best to do it through personal stories and other times it's best to do it through an investigation and show people that this is an actual harm that's happening or something that people are experiencing on the inside. So how do you get, like, those ideas for stories are, are they usually issues you observe yourself or are other inmates like telling you tips? Like how do you navigate that one? I've never used the word inmate or offender. Oh, sorry. Now I always try to educate people on this and it's okay. It's okay, right? Like, this is something we've done in mainstream media. But we should never label someone. When we label someone, we literally make them objectified and create them as an other. Mm-hmm. So I always try to veer away from that and don't feel like that's anything to do with you. Mm-hmm. Because you have been literally brainwashed to talk about people in that way. Mm-hmm. Because that's what our media, our media does, right. Yeah. So, um, but yeah, so like, I I, the stories just come. Mm-hmm. You know, it's your daily life. It's something that you see. It's, it's harm that happens. Right. It's when a, a person I see being taken advantage of, you know, I recently wrote a book Ending Isolation, the case against Solitary Confinement with a law professor friend of mine De Deci, and Dr. Terry Cooper was the leading expert on solitary reform and Quanetta Harris. Mm-hmm. And we literally did that because I sat in the hole, you know, on a false investigation where I've seen this 19-year-old kid getting abused and treating bad by staff. Mm-hmm. And I was like, this is crazy. We need to show people what this is. So I just took the opportunity where I was forced to be in solitary confinement and I took it like a, a, a journalist report, right? Mm-hmm. Like I had been sent over to Iraq or something. Mm-hmm. And I took that time to just document every single thing I was seeing. And that's where a lot of it comes from. And definitely guys like hit me up, I gave hit up all the time. Mm-hmm. Like, Hey, you should write a story about this. You should do this. 'cause often you have to explain to people mm-hmm. Like, well, is this happening? Can we show this? Can we prove this? You know, all these journalistic things. And they're just like, uh, no. And I'm like, well, we're not gonna be able to publish a story because like, we have to have all that, all the elements of it, right? Mm-hmm. But tell some of these stories or, you know, we totally more humanize than ones. And then of course, like, you know, publishers will reach out quite often and have ideas. Mm-hmm. You know, the New York Times has reached out a couple of times with like great ideas, a great friendship with an editor there, Glen Fox, you know, incredible. And she's always like, Hey, we should tell some about this In the system left. Do you have any ideas or do you have an idea about like, if you were thinking about regret, like what would that look like? Mm. You know, so it's always, I, it's just you're around us all the time. It's just like taking the time and effort to share that. Yeah. You, you just mentioned a little bit about, you know, some of the, some of the difficulties of, you know, reporting while being imprisoned. Um, yeah. What, what, what are the, what are the advant because, 'cause I think that like, I, I've done some work with, uh, your colleague Kevin Light Roth, and he has access to places that I don't have access to and then I have access to. Things that he doesn't have access to. Can you talk a little bit about what are the advantages of being an incarcerated journalist and what are the drawbacks and what makes the job difficult? What makes it worth it? Right. Well, I mean, what makes it worth it is you get to share what the world, what's going on, right? Mm-hmm. We get to set the records straight. Often narratives are pulled from one side, and I think that's one of the most important things. The second, and equally is important, is that we're getting to humanize individuals who are inside and reminding people in society that we are all in the same thing together, or just people that have made very bad choices and be accountable to those choices, right? And be remorseful, but also we need to be reminded that we are a part of society and we need to rely on the people of that. Um, the drawbacks is technology, man. Mm-hmm. Like, you know, like you're strict about technology. No internet, no nothing. Mm-hmm. Any of that stuff is wiped out. Everything we do, even writing our stories on the tablets, they do give us. Imagine typing every story you have on your iPhone. That's how I write every story I've ever written. I, or you can write it and then send it out to someone else and name them, type it. I, I noticed when, when Kevin Ke, Kevin has published a couple of stories with us and when he sends his stories, when paragraphs are all numbered and is, is that just because like it's easier to like share the, the story that way through those, those limitations of technology that like, you know, we have Advan, the advantage is like Google Docs out here and we can edit it in real time. But is it like, is that, is that one of the reasons I think that's like kind of illustrative? Right, right, right. That's like something we came up with a long time ago. It's smart. I think it was me and actually Jessica Schulberg, who's at the Huffington Post. We were writing this article about solitary confinement. We were going back and forth and we were like, this is a nightmare. Yeah. Like we need to find a way 'cause we can't cut and past. Right? Yeah. I was like, we need to find a way we can number these. Or, or something. So I can be like, Hey, in paragraph three, I think we should work on this sentence. Mm. Yeah. You know? And then we just kind of conceptualize that idea. And it's something that, you know, I've been thankful to be able to pass on to guys who are doing the same work. Right. 'cause it makes it doable. And there is a beautiful thing about the symbiotic relationship between a reporter out there and a reporter in here. Because like you said, we both have different accesses. Mm-hmm. But we also learn off of each other when we do this work together. Think about all the things we've learned about each other just over the couple months we've worked together. Right. Aaron? Yeah. I think about how important that is that we each teach each other so much when we're doing this work. And again, it always goes back to this, and that's why I always think about it, humanize. Mm-hmm. You humanize people, you look at people different inside. You learn about things that you didn't know. And I learn about things in society that I didn't know. Right. Which allows me to have the empathy. And not just be charged or feeling some kind of way because of the system and the oppression that we experience in these systems. You, you, you talk, you've talked a lot, um, during this conversation about humanizing people. Mm-hmm. And, you know, I, I think that like, one of the things you really emphasize when we're talking is that you, you wanna bring people, you talk about events that you organize where, you know, there's, there's, there's judges and people who have murdered people in the same room and they're just getting to know each other as human beings. Um, which means like, you don't just do journalism, you do a lot of like community building and organizing. And I'm kind of wondering, like, this is something that I ask you sometimes, um, like, do you ever sleep? Yeah. I think my wife thinks I need to start doing more of that as well. Yeah. Um, man, it's, I took a human life. Hmm. Every day I think about that. Right. Yeah, I know you do. It's not a day that goes by and I'm not gonna think about that individual that I took from his family, from his community. So to me, the only thing I can do is give a life of service. But we say that we owe a debt to society. Is that debt for me to sit in prison and play cards and lift weights, or is it for me to actually give and, and, and reinstate some kind of effort back into my community and the people. Right. And that's what I see. So, you know, the work becomes it. Don't get me wrong, it's stressful. Yeah. But at the same time, the driving forces, it's that, that life of service. Right. That's what I'm giving back for the harm that I caused. 'cause that's all I can do. Mm-hmm. There's nothing else you can do when you take a life. Mm. So for me, that's how I think about it. You know? And, and so it, it leads me to being able to do all this work and it's deeply passionate. That I can help people become, other people can become leaders in this space, right? That they can have platforms. I'm not the anomaly. I'm not the only person that can get published in the New York Times and you know, co-found and build an organization like I was able to do with, you know, my wife Chelsea. Right? Like other people can do that. There's a hundred more look to justice organizations that can get built out there. We just have to water those seeds. So for me, I think that's the effort, right? That's the work that we're doing. We're laying foundations for people to really build and change our society if that's what we want to see. Mm-hmm. Otherwise, shit, we're just warehousing people like a can on a shelf. Yeah. And if that cans dented when we put it on the shelf, would we be surprised when we come to take it off 10 years later that it's still ded? Of course. It's didn't do anything to it. So I find that comfort in that. That's my comfort. That's the driving force is knowing what we're doing. Again, humanizing the people that are a part of it, society. We're not casting people off who are incarcerated to an island that'll never be seen again. Mm-hmm. We're putting them in a facility and returning them to the community. How are we gonna return them? How do we want them to return? Mm-hmm. That takes work. And it's a lot of narrative change, right. Because we've been brainwashed and fear mongered for so long that a lot of people will have us believe that just locking someone up for a life for a long sentence is gonna change and fix everything. We've been doing it forever. Mm-hmm. We've been tough on crime for isn't working, it's obviously not working, so we gotta do something different. I, I, I wanted to point out that, um, you mentioned your wife Chelsea, you, you're talking about Dr. Chelsea Moore, who's a, she's a, I think she's a community organizer with the A CLU in California. Is that correct? I just wanted to point out who she was. No, no, no, no. She's the director. She's the director of our policy at the Washington ACL U. The Washington ACL U. Oh, sorry. Thank you. Thank you so much. Um, back to, yeah. She's a policy badass. Yeah, she's, I've spoken to her before. She's extremely intelligent. I was super impressed when I talked to her. Yeah. Um, so I had a quick question also about, um, like sourcing. Um, so like, uh, how do you find sources on while inside? Like, are you able to interview outside sources and then if your sources are also incarcerated? Um, and, and you've talked a lot about humanizing, so like, do their charges ever affect how you view their reliability as a source? Um, if they are incarcerated, because that's something that we face out here, uh, you know, the public tends to discredit. People who are incarcerated in general, you know? Right. Mm-hmm. Because that's what we've been, you know, like, like I was saying, that's what we've been taught to do. Mm-hmm. I don't ever do that. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. If I deserve, not deserve, I don't want to say deserve. If I want to be given forgiveness for this serious harm I caused, then why would anybody else not be welcome to that? Mm-hmm. Or have that opportunity. Right. So for me, I don't, I don't pay attention to that man. You know, it's hard, like, there's definitely things that are hard to stomach. Mm-hmm. I mean, and that's just being honest, right? When you think about someone that, you know, harmed a child or something, that's not easy to, it's not an easy pill to swallow. But at the same time, the more we ostracize them and demonize them, the more they will continue to do what they do because they will never feel like they belong. Mm-hmm. So for me, I feel like we want people to belong in society. There's this thing that happened when I was, when I was just under 18, I was in the juvenile facility. Excuse me. They had built this bootcamp, it was called Camp Outlook. They were gonna run juveniles through it. If you did four months in there, you could go home. Um, you know, early on your sentence, you couldn't have more than a year. They came and asked me. I was the first group to go in there. I was like, yeah, I'll do that. Hell yeah, I'll do that. Look, go a little bootcamp and I get to go home that much early. Let's do it. So I go there, I learn all this stuff, you know, which ran by real drill instructors from the Army, the Marines, and stuff like this. It was the first time I ever had structure in my life. I thrived there immediately, leaving that place. I went and tried to enroll in the Army, greens, the Navy, and got told no by every one of 'em for nonviolent felonies I had as juvenile. Oh. Immediately I felt like I didn't belong in society. Mm. And went right back to what I knew, went right back to the block, went right back to selling drugs, and went right back to all the harm and the bad things that I was causing other people in my community. Because I didn't feel like I belonged. So I think about that every time when someone tries to ostracize or push someone to the side, I'm like, that's gonna make that person cause more harm. Mm-hmm. The only way for us to stop doing that is to show them that they have a spot in this society. And I think that that's the most important thing. Right. So people are gonna do that out there, but it's on us, especially as journalists. Mm-hmm. How we perpetuate that and how we tell those stories. I've done stories where they're like, Hey, we want to do the opening paragraph with, you know, the life you took and, and talk about that person and, and you know what their family went through. And I'm like, hold on a minute. We're writing a story about a Raven that I have a relationship with in prison. We're not even talking about the Carceral system. Yeah. Why would we fire this piece off with that? And I'm like, do you do this with every journalist you work with? Do you find the worst thing they ever did in their life? And you start their every story off with that. And not to mention. Do you even think that we're probably causing this individual's family harm by having to read this every time at the front of every story I write? Mm-hmm. Why would we wanna do that? What benefit is it? And then I think, and I remind myself, it's trauma porn, right? Mm-hmm. It's the thing that we've, we, we've used in our media and society to get people to engage and they just want to indulge more and more and more. Mm-hmm. So we gotta do that, right? That's our job to stop that. And that's why don't use labeling language, right? Mm-hmm. These people, first language, because we're talking about people. So we want to humanize those people and talk about 'em as what they are people. One, sorry one day. Christopher, when we have more time, I would love to talk to you more about like crime coverage in general. I used to be a crime and breaking news reporter in Southern California, so mm-hmm. Um, I have lots of feelings about trauma porn. Interesting time. Yeah. Yeah. No, we can connect anytime Tyler. Mm-hmm. You can reach out to me anytime. Cool. Aaron has my contact information. We can always set up a time, you know, I find these relationships extremely valuable. Mm-hmm. You know, Aaron's been really honest, like, Hey, this is not my space. And I'm like, oh, that's dope. We're gonna learn a lot together. You know what I mean? And I think that's how we get to a healthy place. Right. We have a lot to teach each other. Mm-hmm. And there, there's a reason why we cross paths and there's a reason why we do this work. And I think by us doing that, not only will we learn a lot from each other, but we learn, uh, we learn things that we can share out in our networks and in our community and in our writing and the professional careers that we have. Um, do you have a quick time for one more question? Yeah. Okay. Come on. Um, so this is kind of a logistics question. Um, so surviving on the inside obviously costs money just like surviving on the outside, except, you know, in jail it's legal mm-hmm. To pay incarcerated people next to nothing. So are you able to get paid for your freelance journalism work, or are there specific laws around that that, uh, dictate if like a news organization can pay you or, or another incarcerated journalist? Well, I definitely do and mm-hmm. In Washington, we don't have those laws, thankfully. Okay. Because, you know, they are extremely dehumanizing mm-hmm. And crazy that we could tell someone that they couldn't be paid for their created property. Mm-hmm. Um, so we don't have that issue. Okay. Um, so I think that, you know, we're, we're really blessed to not have those issues in this state, but there are states that are dealing with that. Okay. There are many states across the country where prisoners and people in jail cannot get paid. Right. Yeah. So, but they're exploited for their creative properties. Yeah. Now they're has to do things all the time. It's one of the big things that I've always had an issue with. It's not, you know, sometimes the tell people's mad about the money, but it's the fact that you didn't even offer or ask. Mm-hmm. Like, you just expect people to just do all this labor. You'll, you'll reach out to incarcerated people mm-hmm. And expect them to completely create something and, and like really redevelop something that you're doing in your organization or something. And you wouldn't even think that you should have probably asked that person, Hey, is there a way I can compensate you in some form? You have one minute left. Oh. Because that's something we would do with anybody on the side. Mm-hmm. You know, on, on the outside. So. Okay. And like getting back to humans. But I can do this again later. Okay. But you can always connect again. You can do many interviews. Yeah. I don't mind doing this stuff. I love doing it. No problem. I just wanted to clarify that because know we can get you to reach out to me here or whatever, and yeah, I'm just grateful to be able to do this with you guys. Awesome. Thank you so much for talking to us today, Chris. This is awesome. Thank you so much for this conversation. Let's touch base soon. Okay. All right. I think it might be, it might, it might have gone, the caller had hung up. Okay. So as you can tell at the end of that interview, um, the communication system at the prisons are very, very strange and mercurial. Um, it'll just cut you off when you hit a certain time limit. Um, sort of dropped the call with no notice. That's what happened at the end of that one. Um, so anyways, I thought that was a really insightful interview between Christopher Blackwell, who's an incarcerated journalist who's been published in acclaimed papers across the country, um, and Erin Hedge and Valerie OER here at Range. Okay. So I've never really flown solo by myself like this before, and we've got another 23 minutes to fill. So I'm a yapper and I'm just gonna do my best to pretend like you, the listener or sitting here in the studio with me, and I'm going to tell you about all the news that's happened this week. Um, one of the stories that range put out yesterday actually was a piece that I have been following for a long time. I think I've talked about it on the radio before, actually. It's kind of my, my little obsession right now. I get into these reporting. I don't know, I just, I'm like a bulldog. I sink my teeth into it and I can't really let it go, but. I've been looking into union busting at the local Planned Parenthood, which is ostensibly a pretty progressive organization. Um, but we got ahold of some documents last year that showed that they had filed a contract with the government that, um, you, you have to like, disclose if you have these sort of labor contracts. Um, and they had filed a contract with a union busting firm at the rate of $425 an hour. That was in early November. Uh, at the end of every fiscal year, these companies have to file documents that show just how much money they spent on these contracts over the course of the year. And we recently got a hold of that document. So if you were wondering how much Planned Parenthood of Greater Washington and North Idaho spent on union busting last year, I have the answer for you. It is over $15,000, um, $15,570 to be exact. And you know, one of the comments I had gotten on this story on Reddit, I think was, well, that's pocket change. That's barely any money at all. And I do have a, a bit of a response to that. First of all, do we just let people do a little union busting as a treat? I don't, I don't think so. I don't, I don't think that's fair to workers. Uh, no matter how much money you're spending on union busting, it's still probably too much money. But when you really look at the numbers, I think that $15,000 is more significant than it might seem. At face value first, of course, it was $15,000 for the entirety of 2024, but when you look at when the contracts were filed, it's got that early November, uh, stamp on it. So really Planned Parenthood spent over $15,000 on union busting in just 49 days from November to the end of December. All of their 2024 spending was done in the last two months. Um, and that amounts to $317 a day on a union busting contract. I did a little rough math. Um, of course they don't respond to requests from comment from me, but they have to file all of this documentation with the government. And, um, ProPublica, which is another journalism outlet, I quite enjoy, kind of collates all of these forms on their website, including the nine 90 forms. And so I have planned Parenthood's nine 90 form from 2023, which is where I'm getting a lot of this data. Um, and as of 2023, they had, I think it was 198 employees on staff. So essentially for what they spent on union busting in two months or 49 days, they could have paid employees like a bonus of 80 some dollars. Um. Pulling these numbers off the top of my head. I have them written down somewhere. Uh, it also, if you extrapolate this out for 2025, because the contract that Planned Parenthood signed didn't have an end date on it, nor did it have a spending cap. So I think it's a pretty fair assumption that they're continuing to pay for those union busting services. And if they continue at a rate of $317 a day through the entirety of 2025, that would be an additional $115,705 on union busting. Um, when we published our initial story back in December about that first document we found that disclosed the $425 an hour contract. We continued reporting on this for a couple of months, and one of the things we found was that Planned Parenthood was avoiding calls for accountability from some of their major donors. Some of these people had given hundreds of thousands of dollars. One person we talked to had given half a million dollars, and they were horrified to find out that Eastland Carl Eastland, the CEO of Planned Parenthood of Greater Washington in North Idaho was paying for union busting activities. Um, Carn Nielsen, a major donor who gave $300,000 for the construction of PP Gwynne's. Spokane campus told me back in March that the idea that the staff are trying to unionize and eastlands trying to break that just is not acceptable. I'm appalled at what they're doing and trying to silence all this. Nielsen and other donors tried to get ahold of anybody at Planned Parenthood. Um, they both called Carl Eastland. I think one of the other donors we talked to called, uh, the board president. They sent emails to any contact info or any contacts they still had at the organization. And it was radio silence. Um, and these are people who have donated a lot of money, which is not to say that they get to have any control over a nonprofit's operations, but it is to say that they wanted accountability and they wanted to know that the money that they donated was not being spent on union busting activities. Nielsen, who I just quoted from, had written Planned Parenthood into her will, and when she was ghosted by Planned Parenthood, after she reached out to inquire about union busting, she ended up writing them out of her will. For this story, I also called Planned Parenthood, um, called the contacts that I had there and tried to get comment and did not hear back. Um, on the last story, I was able to get a hold of the board president for about 30 seconds until I told him what I was doing and what I was asking questions about. And then he started saying, hello, hello. Like, he couldn't hear me and maybe he couldn't, but I immediately called back. He didn't answer. I called back a third time. He didn't answer. I called back an hour later and again, he didn't answer. So I'm pretty skeptical as to whether or not he could hear me. So that was the piece that I put out yesterday on the latest update in the local Planned Parenthoods Union busting saga. Um, I would tell you, you could call in and ask questions, but you know, I'm by myself, so can't really answer the phone and also I don't know how, um, it's a little complicated. Let's see other news that happened this week. Um, you know, governor Bob Ferguson has been signing a lot of bills that passed the legislature into laws. Uh, one of his most recent pieces of legislation that he signed was for rent stabilization, which is an issue that I covered a couple weeks ago in depth. Um, the original version of rent stabilization was quite a bit stronger than what ended up passing and becoming law. Um, it, it was just a lot. It, it, so rent stabilization sets a cap on how much landlords can raise your rent per year. So if you're living in a house and you pay a thousand dollars a month, um. Without rent stabilization, your landlord can come to you with a new lease and say, okay, well the market's changed and I am charging you $1,500 a month next year. So if you wanna stay in this place, um, you have a week or two to decide if you're staying or find a completely new pace, place to live. And, um, if you wanna stay, you have to pay $1,500. And it can be really jarring for people, um, to kind of find that out with not a ton of notice that their rent is going up by a massive amount. Um. Here in Spokane, we have a local remedy to that where landlords have to give a 180 day notice if they're going to be raising your rent by more than 3%. Um, my on the fly math is like notably bad, but I think, uh, that would be if you were paying a thousand dollars a month and your landlord wanted to raise your rent by more than $30, they would have to give you a 180 day notice here in Spokane. So anyways, we've got this rent stabilization bill that wants to set a cap on how much your landlord can raise your rent. The original draft was to set that cap at 7%, so a thousand dollars rent. Your landlord wants to raise your rent by $70. That's the maximum amount they can raise it. Um, I really should, uh, get my phone out really quick and make sure that that is indeed a 7%. Um. 7%. Uh, but essentially it would cap that your landlord would not be able to raise your rent by more than that in any given year. Now, that doesn't necessarily control the market in the same way that rent control does. Um. Because if you move out of a unit that you were paying a thousand dollars a month for, I just checked my math that I'm correct, it is $70. But if you were paying a thousand dollars a month for a unit and you move out in between tenants, a landlord can jack that straight up to 1500 without any kind of notification. And so the next tenant that wanted to rent that unit would have to pay that new number. This just protects tenants who are living there and continuing leases. So the original pitch was a 7% cap that got softened down to a 7% plus inflation or 10% cap, whichever is less. So the version of the bill that got signed into law recently would say that if you were renting a thousand dollars a month unit and your landlord wanted to raise your rent by more than, um, a hundred dollars, they could not do that. It also, I don't remember the percentage off the top of my head, but it does include a notification clause of 90 days. So if your landlord is going to raise your rent by a certain percentage, I wanna say it was anything more than 5%. Anything more than 3%, maybe they have to give you a 90 day notice so that you can start looking for a new place. There's some other stuff in there as well. There's a few exceptions that got written in for new constructions are exempt from this. Um, like I mentioned, there's no limit for that between period, so a landlord can jack up the rent to whatever they want to in between tenants. So it's not really, um, controlling the market per se, as it is just protecting individual tenants. And, you know, we heard from renters rights advocates who were really pushing for a stronger version of this bill. Uh, and at the end of the day, there just wasn't the support, especially in the Senate to make that happen. The version that passed the house was more aggressive and had firmer protections. So I don't think this is a fight that is going to go away. I don't know that people consider it a firm victory for renters. I think it's maybe a first step forward and continuing to lobby, um, both of Spokane's House of Reps. Uh. Or both of Spokane's representatives, Natasha Hill and Tim Ormsby were in support of the stronger renter protections. They were big advocates for it. Um, and so actually I think Natasha Hill was a sponsor on a couple of housing related bills intended to increase housing supply. Uh, I think she was on the one intended to increase density of construction on transit lines. And so Spokane has a pretty, pretty strong pro housing, pro renter delegation down at legislation this year. Um. I will link a story about what ended up in the final version of the law in our page on KYR s.com, so that you can take a little sneak peek at that, figure out what to expect, figure out what to hold your landlord accountable to in case you maybe have, um, a rent raise and you think this might be illegal and you wanna check in on it. And I'll also, um, I'll dig up my old story on the local regulations as well and throw in a link to that so that you know, if you're in Spokane City limits, there are additional protections that you are subject to as well. So that was one story that happened this week. Um, wow. I really am yapping. Let me see what else we posted on our website. Um, you know, the other big thing that. I've been working on is a piece on the Stripper's bill of Rights, and this is another one of my little, like obsessions. Um, I cover city hall, but I'm also a labor rights reporter. And what that means is that I seek out and write pieces that center the struggles of the working Washingtonian, um, that help us move towards collective power building for workers. And you can definitely see that thread in my stories about union busting and poor labor conditions. But I think, um, the stories that I am most excited about are my coverage on sex workers. I've written a few pieces. One of the ones I'm most proud of was my story on the Stripper's Bill of Rights last year. You may not know this, but Washington has some of the most, or I should say, had some of the most draconian laws when it came to regulations around strip clubs. So until, um, early 2024, what those laws looked like in Washington were really strict zoning laws about where strip clubs could and couldn't operate, which ultimately lent itself to very few clubs. I think in 2024 there was only 11 strip clubs in the entire state of Washington, and that number might have came from before. Deja Vu Club here in Spokane, which was actually the only strip club in the entire eastern Washington, closed down, um, at the tail end of 2023. And so we've got this. There are club owners that have like a monopoly on clubs. It's really hard to open a new club, and that creates this, this market that gives club owners a lot of power. On top of that, until recently, Washington did not allow alcohol service and clubs. You might be thinking that's a really good idea. When people get drunk, they might get handsy, they might make dancers unsafe. Like I can see where that regulation came from. But when we actually sat down and interviewed dancers here in Washington, they were overwhelmingly pushing for that law to change, pushing for a path for clubs to be able to apply for liquor licenses. This was for a couple reasons. First, um, if there was liquor service available in clubs, it's being served by somebody with a mask permit. Somebody who is qualified to do that. Somebody who, you know, whose job it is to keep their finger on the pulse of whether or not somebody is too intoxicated to behave themselves, too intoxicated, to be safe. And a lot of times people want alcohol in strip clubs. So when alcohol service was banned, dancers told me that people would just get hammered at the nearest bar, or they would take shots in the parking lot before they came in. And so that would result in people being really intoxicated really quickly to the point of unsafeness. And it was nobody's job to keep track of that. Um, and so dancers found themselves in unsafe situations with intoxicated patrons. The other reason is the profit model for dancers in Washington. Strippers in Washington are, um, independent contractors. And so kind of like how, um, your tattoo artist might rent their booth space from a tattoo parlor, or maybe the person who cuts your hair rents their chair at a salon dancers rent club time, or they call it stage fees. Um, so you basically pay a fee to use the stage on any given night. Um. And this means that club owners were almost exclusively making their money off of dancers. Dancers would come in, they'd pay their stage fee, they'd dance, and then there's also services that customers could add on on top of that, like private shows or lap dancers. And then dancers had to pay fees for those services as well. So if a dancer's getting paid a hundred dollars by a customer, a club might take $50 of that depending on what their rate is or what their rent is. And this profit model created a situation where club owners were incentivized to make their monies off of dancer's backs. Dancers had been lobbying for these laws to be changed in Washington. They said, especially for folks who lived in Seattle, it was more profitable to drive the couple of hours over to Portland dance on stages in Portland and then drive back. Um, I've been interviewing, I think I've interviewed her like five times, a dancer that lives here in Spokane, but exclusively dances outta state. She travel dances in Wisconsin. She went down to Vegas for the Super Bowl. Um, and it just is more profitable than trying to make a career here in Washington because of the way our profit structure is set up. And so last year in 2024. Dancers organized through this group called Strippers or workers that was sort of a labor collective of dancers across the state that were really organized in the way that they pitched legislators, in the way that they explained how necessary and important it was for something to change with Washington's laws around this. They were ultimately successful. Uh, the stripper's Bill of Rights passed in 2024. About half of it went into effect in June of 2024, and the last half went into effect in January 1st, 2025. And so I did some reporting and a story that's going to come out this afternoon, I think, on how well the implementation of that bill has gone. Spoiler alert. Uh, it sounds like club owners in Seattle have. Instead been looking for loopholes in the legislation. So some dancers told me that they're actually making a lot less than they were before the bill passed because of what's called a revenue share model. Where instead of, um, charging dancers for stage fees, the amount they could charge dancers was capped in this new legislation at 30% or $150 a night, whichever was less. Um, they're now taking the money upfront from the customer and then paying out dancers their share of the revenue. And this way it's not a fee, but they're able to take as much of the money as they want without it being called a fee. And so dancers say that even in clubs that have gotten their liquor licenses, it just seems like club owners are trying to double dip, um, make money off alcohol sales and make more money off of dancers'. Laborers and dancers are really the one getting the short end of the stick here. So I looked into, you know, how the implementation of this bill is going, and also maybe some signs for hope, some more organized labor from dancers who are pushing legislators to close the loopholes in this legislation. Um, some stories from dancers who are still looking to open their own clubs in Washington, trying to figure their way around complicated zoning laws to open their own spaces. That would be stripper owned, stripper managed. Um. And a dancer who throws their own shows in Seattle with a really fair profit model. Um, they said that dancers can perform just one set in one of their shows and come away making between, I think they said 250 and $350 for like one set of dancing without having to do any lap dances or private shows without having to give a cut to any club owner, which is an extremely good rate for their labor. Um, so I think that while. You know, I think, uh, one of the dancers I interviewed said like, club owners are gonna act like club owners. And that's definitely the case. There's, there's a lot of people who just try to make as much money as they can, um, take as much from laborers and workers as they can. But there's also a lot of hope, a lot of reasons to stay optimistic. And I think, I really hope that people read this story and start to see sex workers in a different light start to value their labor and think of them as workers just like you and I, who are united in the struggle for power and accountability and fair wages, good working conditions, safety, the ability to build a life for ourselves and our families. And that gets us to the end of our time. I hope you're not too tired of my voice already. This is Free range, a co-production of KYRS and Range Media.